COVID19 CAN BE MAN-MADE?
How covid19 started in the city of Wuhan and spread all over the world is still a mystery, which brought many conspiracy theories with it. The coronavirus can be man-made? Coronaviruses have been known since the 1960s. The zoonotic ones are; Sars, Mers, HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E, SARS-CoV-2.
Although the scientific world knew these viruses, it was not popular for many. This brought to mind whether this is a biological weapon or man-made. According to a survey, 3 out of 10 Americans believe COVID-19 was made in the lab.
Conspiracy theories are spreading faster than coronavirus because people are more concerned with superstition than facts.
Judy Mikovits’ documentary plandemic, which was watched by millions of people, was removed from social media. Judy Mikovist, known as an anti-vaccine activist, says that the flu vaccine increases the chance of getting infected with the coronavirus. however, there is no scientific evidence to confirm this. Another claim was that the use of masks increased virulence. But, there is no evidence for this argument.
Another speculation was the claim that the Nobel prize winner Tasuko Honjo said that the virus was made in the laboratory. but he denied this claim.
Scientists’ views on how the disease spreads are quite consistent. But no one can speak as precisely as politicians. According to Dr. Alex Greninger, you can not answer whether the virus is coming from the laboratory only by looking at the genomic structure. So it is important to know which viruses the Wuhan Institute of Virology is working on.
Shi Zhengli who is working with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Virology Institute, made a study comparing the samples which she took from patients with covid19 with the coronaviruses she studied. She found 96% match with the coronavirus named Ratg13 from the horseshoe bats in Yunnan cave. This was good news for her because none of the coronavirus samples she worked on were 100% matched to those of patients.
According to another study, Shan-Lu Liu said that “there is no reliable evidence that the virus is man-made.” If the virus genome had been altered, we would have expected to see the gene sequences added. However, we see that the points that differ from bat viruses are dispersed quite randomly as if they had evolved naturally.
Nikola Petrovsky from Flinders University shares a different perspective. Bat coronaviruses can be cultured in the laboratory with cells that have human ace2 receptors, and in time the virus can gain adaptations to bind to these cells.
If this scenario happened, it would obviously be considered human-made. And someone in the lab says it could spread the virus through the animal market.
We may never get an exact answer, but that doesn’t matter. According to Keusch, the evolution in nature is the same as the accidental release from the lab or deliberate genetic manipulation in the lab.
Resources
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/08/nearly-three-in-ten-americans-believe-covid-19-was-made-in-a-lab/
https://www.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/about/events_news/department/koto-kenkyu-in/news/2020/200427_1.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1733440
https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-not-human-made-in-lab.html
